r 
 
THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 WAETON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 II 
 
 The Connexion between Ancient 
 and Modern Eomance 
 
 By 
 
 W. J. Courthope, C.B. 
 
 Fellow of the Academy 
 
 [From the Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol F] 
 
 London 
 
 Published for the British Academy 
 
 By Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press 
 
 Amen Comer, E.G. 
 
 Price One Shilling net 
 
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WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 II 
 
 THE CONNEXION BETWEEN ANCIENT 
 AND MODERN ROMANCE 
 
 By W. J. COURTHOPE, C.B. 
 
 FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 
 
 Read October 25, 1911. 
 
 The besetting sin of the Classical Renaissance was the sacrifice of 
 the spirit of imaginative matter to the mechanism of literary form. 
 It was reasonable that the Humanists, in their enthusiasm for the 
 rediscovered masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature, should recoil 
 from the barbarous diction of the late Mediaeval Schoolmen. But, 
 when they prescribed the revived classic forms as the only legitimate 
 moulds of expression for all kinds of modern thought, they forgot, on 
 the one hand, that the great monuments of ancient literature were 
 the product of a spirit which, having passed away from the world, 
 could never reappear exactly in its former body, and, on the other, 
 that the despised mediaeval forms, however lifeless they might now 
 seem, were once instinct with vital meaning. The external Classical 
 Form was to them an idol of style, initiating, as Mr. Ker told us in 
 his inaugural lecture, a movement of Culture which tended to become 
 stilted and artificial, while it also encouraged the Humanist critic to 
 regard his o\vn perceptions as the final and absolute standard of 
 judgement. Hence such arrogant pronouncements as that cited by 
 Mr. Ker from Lowell on the Poetry of the Provencals, and the 
 comprehensive sneer of M. Taine at mediaeval literature as a whole, 
 noticed in the Preface to my History of English Poetry. 
 
 Thomas Warton deserves all the praise that has been awarded to 
 him as a pioneer of the reaction against this literary intolerance. 
 The generous recognition extended by him to the work of the older 
 English poets was of the greatest value in widening the area of 
 
 R 
 
 242241 
 
ST"' PfrOCEEDW&SOF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 national taste, and his industry in collecting the remains of mediaeval 
 antiquity did much to counteract the tendency of his age to proscribe 
 all the productions of European imagination before the Classical 
 Revival. The only thing wanting to make him stand forth as a bright 
 example of the beneficial results arising from an alliance between 
 literary and antiquarian criticism was historic appreciation of medi- 
 aeval form as well as of mediaeval matter. Unfortunately, as his 
 correspondence with Gray shows, he restricted his historical aim to 
 antiquarian collection, and, though he was an excellent Humanist 
 critic, he was only a second-rate antiquary. A typical scholar of 
 the Renaissance, he was inclined to judge every characteristic work 
 of the Middle Ages, from a superior point of view, as the product of 
 a barbarous author. ' We,"* he says, speaking of The Divine Comedy^ 
 ' are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, 
 paradise, and purgatory." ^ And the apology he offers to the reader 
 for Dante''s procedure is instinct with the condescension of the 
 Classical Humanist : ' This prolixity is partly owing to the want 
 of art and method, and is common to all early compositions, in 
 which everything is related circumstantially without rejection, and 
 not in the general terms which are used by modern writers.** ^ Had 
 Warton regarded The Divine Comedy, not simply as an antiquarian 
 curiosity, but with historic sympathy, he must have seen that, so far 
 from the mode of its composition being ' surprising \ the marvel 
 would have been if such an artist as Dante had treated his materials 
 otherwise than he did ; the Humanist critic would, in fact, have found 
 the form of the poem, from a historical point of view, not less worthy 
 of his study than the matter. 
 
 Precisely the same defect may be noted in the criticism of the 
 mediaeval Romances by the leading literary historians at the close of 
 the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. All of 
 these critics were men of taste and refinement ; but, as they did not 
 take the trouble to realize historically the spirit of the Romance- 
 writers, they neglected the lesson to be learned from the form of 
 their compositions, and so contrived to convey to the reader a wrong 
 impression about the subject-matter. 
 
 Thomas Warton, for instance, says of the origin of Romantic 
 Fiction : — 
 
 * That peculiar and arbitrary species of Fiction, which we commonly 
 call Romantic, was entirely unknown to the writers of Greece and 
 Rome. It appears to have been imported into Europe by a people 
 
 * Thomas Warton on Dante. Cited by Mr. Ker, in his Inaugural Warton 
 Lecture, November 16, 1910. 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROMANCE 3 
 
 whose modes of thinking and habits of invention are not natural to 
 that country. It is generally supposed to have been borrowed from 
 the Arabians.' ^ 
 
 Thomas Percy, who had treated the subject of the Romances 
 before Warton, took an entirely different view of their origin, but, 
 like him, thought of Romance as a ' peculiar and arbitrary species of 
 Fiction \ ^ John Colin Dunlop, in his Historij of Fktion, recognized 
 that the origin of Romance was far more complex than had been 
 supposed by either Percy or Warton, but agreed with them in 
 thinking that the term essentially involved what he called 'those 
 wild and improbable fictions^ those supernatural ornaments which 
 form the machinery of Romance and which alone should be termed 
 Romantic Fiction '.^ Nevertheless, he classed as ' Romantic Fiction ' 
 the Greek Novels, the machinery of which is scarcely at all dependent 
 on the presence of 'supernatural ornaments'. And, though his 
 enumeration of the works of 'that peculiar and arbitrary species 
 of Fiction, which we call Romantic', was far more elaborate and 
 exhaustive than what was attempted by his predecessors, Dunlop 
 arranged his materials without any reference to their sequence in 
 order of time, thus ignoring the gradual modifications which suc- 
 cessive generations of mediaeval Romance-writers introduced into 
 their compositions. He gives the following reason for making his 
 account of the Romances as exhaustive as possible : — 
 
 ' Even the dulness of the fictions of Chivalry is, in some degree, 
 instructive, as acquainting us with the monotonous mode of life which 
 prevailed during the periods that gave them birth, while at the same 
 time, by a comparison of the intellectual powers exhibited in romance 
 with the exertions of the same age in law, theology, and other pur- 
 suits, we are enabled to form an estimate of the employment of 
 genius in those distant periods, and to behold in what arts and sciences 
 it was most successfully displayed.' ^ 
 
 The ' dulness of the fictions of Chivalry ' was in fact regarded by 
 the Humanist critic as a sufficient excuse for his omission to examine 
 their literary form, and Dunlop makes no attempt to account for the 
 difference of spirit displayed respectively in the Roman de Brut and 
 the Romance of Amadu of Gaul Yet the difference is fundamental. 
 
 The term ' Roman ' in the beginning, so far from implying con- 
 scious fiction, signified history orally recited in the Romance language, 
 
 ^ Dissertation 1 in Warton's History of English Poetry. 
 '^ Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vol. iii, p. 3. 
 3 Dunlop, History of Fiction (1888), vol. i, p. 116. 
 * Ibid., vol. i, p. 351. 
 
4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 as opposed to history written in Latin. The Roman de Brut and the 
 Roman de Troie were new versions, in the vulgar tongue, of the 
 Historia Regiim B?itanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the De 
 Excidio Trojae Historia of Dares Phrygius. Wace and Benoit 
 de Ste. More added the metrical style of the Norman minstrel to 
 the supposed history of the ecclesiastical chronicler and the pseudo- 
 Trojan forger. Their history was indeed of a very different kind 
 from the narrative of a Thucydides, a Livy, or a Tacitus ; but, 
 carrying with it the authority of a Latin original, it offered a suffi- 
 cient warrant to unsophisticated audiences that they were not wasting 
 their time in listening to idle fictions, but were improving their minds 
 with solid knowledge. On the other hand, the Norman 'trouvere' 
 naturally imported into the new and authoritative historical matter 
 the free spirit and manner of the minstrel, so that, in the earliest 
 ' romans "*, fabulous genealogy and national legend form, as they did in 
 the * Chansons de Geste ', leading features of the composition. 
 
 But about the middle and end of the twelfth century, and midway 
 into the thirteenth, the ' romans ' of Chrestien de Troyes, followed, as 
 they were, by tales like Flore et Blanchefleur and the lays of Marie 
 de France, exhibit a radical change of form. They resemble indeed 
 the ' romans ' of Wace and Benoit de Ste. More in their octosyllabic 
 verse and in their continued claim to be the vehicles of true history. 
 As regards the latter point, Chrestien de Troyes says, in the beginning 
 of his Roman de Cliget : * This history I found written in one of the 
 books of the library of Monsignor Paul at Beauvais, which is witness 
 to the truth of the history and makes it worthy of belief.' ' Marie of 
 France, in one of her ' lays ', says that she had at first intended to 
 make a good history, and translate it from Latin into Romance. But, 
 finding this path too much trodden, she resolved to make a new- 
 departure in the language of Romance from the Breton lays, which 
 she, or at least her audience, regarded as historical, and she declared 
 that the fidelity of her reproduction might be verified by reference to 
 MSS. preserved in a Monastery at Caerleon.^ Nevertheless, her 
 poems and the tales of Chrestien, instead of being histories like those 
 of Wace — that is to say, narratives of battles between rival races 
 and opposing chieftains — relate the adventures of individuals, which 
 depend for their main interest on complications caused by love. 
 
 How are we to account for this remarkable revolution in romantic 
 form ? The antiquarian critic replies at once : ' By the influence of 
 the Celtic element in the composition ' ; and he naturally applies all 
 
 * Histoire litteraire de France, vol. xv, ' Chrestien de Troyes.' 
 ^ Poesies de Marie de France (Roquefort), vol. i, p. 543. 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROMANCE 5 
 
 his industry to discover the existence of the original authorities 
 referred to by Chrestien and Marie de France. His answer is, 
 I think, obviously inadequate. I fully believe, indeed, that many of 
 the materials employed by these poets were derived from Celtic sources. 
 Chrestien and his successors doubtless found in existence, in Celtic 
 folk-lore, some kind of embryonic legends of the ' chanson de geste ' 
 order, which provided them with a foundation for their tales about 
 the Round Table : the names of the knights, for example, and the 
 magical episodes which enliven their narratives, have an evidently 
 Celtic character. But no connected story of adventure, whether of 
 love or war, has yet been discovered among the really ancient remains 
 of Celtic poetry. On the other hand, many of the complications in 
 the * romans ' arise out of conditions which are peculiar to the feudal 
 society contemporaneous with the appearance of the poem in the 
 Romance tongue, and have little significance in the society of the 
 primitive Celtic age. The refined casuistry of love, which provides 
 so much of the machinery in the romances of the Round Table, 
 speaks of itself to the influence of the ' Cours d' Amour ' ; and the 
 relations of Tristram and Lancelot to the wives of their sovereigns 
 are illustrations of particular offences, lese-mqjeste and Use-feodalite, 
 involved in the law of feudalism, as it existed in the twelfth, thirteenth, 
 and fourteenth centuries. 
 
 The natural inference from these facts is, I think, that, from 
 whatever source the materials in the new class of ' roman '' may be 
 derived, the free handling of them is due to the invention of the 
 *trouvere\ and their general character to the taste of the contem- 
 poraneous Anglo-Norman or French Society. When Chrestien de 
 Troyes and Marie de France speak as if they were reproducing in the 
 Romance language some historical tale which may be found written 
 in Latin or Celtic, we may conclude that they are merely employing 
 a device similar to the fiction of Chaucer in a later age, who pretends 
 that his story of Troilus and Criseyde is based on the authority of 
 a Latin historian named Lollius, though we know that whatever in 
 the poem was not of his own invention was mostly derived from 
 Boccaccio's Filostrato, In other words, through all the metrical 
 ' romans ' of the second period, the inventive spirit of the Northern 
 minstrel is seen to be prevailing over the professed matter of fact of 
 the ecclesiastical historian. 
 
 This accounts for the character of the second class of 'roman' 
 on the historical side, but it leaves the revolution in poetical form 
 still unexplained. So abrupt a change from the style of the old 
 'chanson de geste' as appears in the Romances of Chrestien and 
 
6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Marie de France could hardly have been achieved without a sug- 
 gestion at least from some pre-existing model. Warton supposes 
 that the poetical ornaments of the romances were borrowed ready- 
 made from the Arabians, and thinks that the features they present 
 have no analogy to any form of fiction known to the Greeks and 
 Romans. But the supernatural machinery of Romance in its final 
 development — giants, enchanters, and the like — scarcely enters into 
 the structure of Chrestien''s 'romans'. Nor are the most marked 
 features in some of his tales — the adventures of a pair of faithful but 
 unfortunate lovers — specially characteristic of Arabian fiction. On 
 the other hand, such adventures constitute the essence of the interest 
 in the tales of the Greek Novelists. 
 
 The Greek novel was still being produced for the entertainment of 
 the Eastern world, while the Crusades were attracting the chivalry of 
 the West. Eustathius' story, Hysminias and Hysmme^ for instance, 
 is believed to have been written in the twelfth century, during the 
 reign of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus.^ Why then should the errant 
 'trouveres' of the Crusades have shown less enterprise in learning 
 enough Greek to provide them with hints for the plots of their 
 'romans"' than the modern British playwright shows in borrowing 
 ideas for his dramas from the French ? Chrestien himself — a retainer 
 of Philip, Count of Flanders, killed at the siege of Acre in 1191 — 
 in seeking fresh suggestions for his minstrelsy, would have had before 
 him such tales as the Hahrocovias andAnthia of Xenophon of Ephesus ; 
 the Ethiopica of Heliodorus, sometimes called Theagenes and Chariclea ; 
 the Ckitophon and Leucippe of Achilles Tatius ; and the Daphnis and 
 Chloe, usually assigned to a writer called Longus. These prose fictions 
 are the last stage in the decadence of Greek literature. They are the 
 remote and degenerate offspring of the Attic drama, after dramatic 
 interest had passed from the moral didacticism of the Chorus to the 
 mechanical evolution of the plot; and the attention paid by the 
 novelists to the imaginative surprises involved in the adventures of 
 the dramatis personae — in dvayvcapia-Ls (or recognition) for example, 
 and in wepLTriTeia (or reversal of Fortune) — shows that the taste of the 
 Greek reader, even at this late period, was determined by the same kind 
 of critical principles as we find declared in the Poetics of Aristotle in 
 regard to Tragedy and Epic Poetry. All of the stories are full of 
 those * moving accidents by flood and field' which entranced the 
 imagination of Desdemona, and especially of misfortunes showing 
 that ' the course of true love never did run smooth \ 
 
 ^ Dunlop, History of Fiction, vol. i, p. 77. 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROMANCE 7 
 
 Poor as their art was, it was much in advance of any method of 
 story- telling known to the 'trouvere'; and the influence of the Greek 
 example begins to show itself even in the superficial structural features 
 of the ' romans ' of the twelfth century. The alteration of the titles 
 of the tales from the Roman de Troie or Roman de Biid to Enid and 
 Eric, Ywain and Gawain, Flore et Blaiicliefleur, &c., indicates in itself 
 an imitation of Theagenes and Chariclea, Cleitophon and LeiLcippe^ 
 Habrocomas and Anthia, marking the transition from the ethnic 
 ' chansons de geste ' to the ' romance "* of individual knights and lovers. 
 
 But we have many more direct proofs of the acquaintance of the 
 'trouveres"* with the Greek Novels. The early metrical tale of 
 Flore et Blanchejleur shows plain traces in its structure of the study 
 of Theagenes and Chariclea ; while Habrocomas and Anthia pro- 
 vided Chrestien de Troyes with several suggestions for the plot of 
 his Roman de Cliget. The last-named 'roman' furnishes perhaps 
 the best example of the results produced by the ' trouvere'*s ' study 
 of Greek fiction. We find that one of its most striking episodes 
 is borrowed directly from the Habrocomas and Anthia of Xenophon. 
 In that story the heroine, Anthia, to save herself from a marriage 
 with Perilaus, governor of Cilicia, and to preserve her troth-plight 
 to Habrocomas, procures from a travelling physician a soporific 
 draught which produces the appearance of death and causes her 
 to be buried alive.^ Like Juliet, she revives in the tomb, but, 
 unlike her, is at last happily restored to her lover. The same thing, 
 mutatis mutandis, happens to Fenice, the heroine of the Roman de 
 Cliget. Being in love with Cliget, but married against her will 
 to the Emperor of the East, she procures a delay in the consum- 
 mation of the marriage, and is afterwards buried alive in a tomb, 
 animation being suspended by a sleeping draught.^ An imitation 
 of this kind tells its own story, and the source of the invention is 
 revealed still more clearly by the identity of the leading motive in 
 the minds of the Greek and French authors, namely, the preservation 
 of fidelity to each other by two lovers separated by a thousand trials 
 and misfortunes. When Anthia is finally restored to Habrocomas, 
 she addresses him as follows : — 
 
 'My dear lord and husband, I have recovered you at last after 
 long wanderings by land and sea, and, having escaped the threats of 
 robbers, the treachery of pirates, the injuries of chains, tombs, poisons, 
 and sepulchres, I return to you, my soul's life, my Habrocomas, just 
 as I was when I left you at Tyre to be carried off into Syria. . . . 
 
 ^ Xenophon, Ephesiacorum Hb. iii. 
 
 * Histoire litteraire de France, vol. xv, ' Chrestien de Troyes.' 
 
8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 I have invented all the arts that modesty allows in order to preserve 
 my fidelity unimpaired for you. And you, my Habrocomas, have 
 you kept the same honest counsel ? Has any one seemed to you 
 fairer than myself? Has no one sought to make you forget me and 
 your plighted faith ? ' ^ 
 
 Precisely the same question is put by Fenice to Cliget when she 
 has related to him the arts by which she had escaped the consumma- 
 tion of her marriage with the Emperor.^ But, though Chrestien is 
 indebted for many of his inventions to Greek predecessors, he shows 
 himself to be no servile imitator. He feels rightly that the characters, 
 manners, and sentiments of his Greek model are of an effeminate kind, 
 quite unfitted to gratify the taste of his warlike western audience, and 
 he is careful to invest his story in these respects with an atmosphere 
 suited to feudal circumstances. No ' roman '-writer of the twelfth or 
 thirteenth centuries seems to have tried to imitate Daphnis and Chloe ; 
 nor is this surprising in a rough and uncivilized age, not yet prepared 
 to appreciate the pastoral sentimentalism which appealed so strongly 
 to the sophisticated taste of later and more lettered epochs. 
 Whether the passion of Love be used for the purpose of complicating 
 adventurous action, as in the Romance of Tristi'am, or for enforcing 
 ascetic doctrine, as in The Quest of the Holy Grail, the treatment of, 
 it by the mediaeval romance-^vriter necessarily differs profoundly from 
 its treatment by the Greek novelist. 
 
 To reduce such metrical tales of love and chivalry to prose was an 
 obvious improvement, which seemed to make them approach more 
 closely at once to the vividness of Greek fiction and to the gravity of 
 Latin history. Such is evidently the motive of the prose ' romans "* of 
 the Round Table, produced, from the end of the twelfth to the 
 beginning of the fourteenth century, by Helie and Robert de Borron, 
 Walter Map, Lucas de Gast, and Rusticien of Pisa.^ In these 
 compositions the element of poetic fiction becomes gross and palpable. 
 Nevertheless, the strength of the historic tradition manifests itself in 
 the constant reiteration, by the authors, of the fable that they are 
 translating from Latin originals. Thus, in the opening of Gyron le 
 Courtois, the writer, addressing his readers, says : — 
 
 ' Know you truly that this book was translated from the book of 
 
 * Xenophon, Ephesiacorum Hb. v. 
 
 ^ Histoire litteraire de France, vol. xv, ' Chrestien de Troyes.' 
 ^ 1 am aware that some scholars believe the earlier romances in prose to have 
 been composed before those in metre, but, in the absence of all positive evidence 
 on the subject, I do not think that the view I have put forward need be affected 
 by a theory which is in itself improbable. 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROMANCE 9 
 
 Monsignor Edward, king of England, at that time when he passed 
 beyond the sea, in the service of our Lord, to gain possession of the 
 Holy Sepulchre. And master Rusticien of Pisa compiled this 
 Romaunt, for from that book of King Edward of England he 
 translated all the marvellous adventures that are in this book." ^ 
 
 After a narrative full of the most extravagant descriptions and 
 incidents, Rusticien leaves his heroes and heroines in sorry plight, 
 but with the alleviating announcement: — 
 
 ' How they were delivered I make no mention, inasmuch as the 
 Latin book ends their adventures at this point ; but the Romaunt of 
 King Meliadus of Lyonnesse tells the manner in which they were 
 delivered and by whom.'^ 
 
 So long as a ' Latin Book "* could be cited, no limits needed to be 
 set to the invention of the prose romance-writer. The Greater 
 Romance of the Grail, for example, was a recast of an earlier and 
 shorter 'roman' with the same title, in which apparently the 
 'trouvere"* was thought not to have availed himself sufficiently of 
 his opportunities for introducing supernatural incident ; and as there 
 was authority for many of the episodes in the apocryphal Gospel 
 of Nicodemus, the revised and longer fairy-tale was received with 
 general satisfaction.^ Sometimes, indeed, the Latin text of the 
 Chronicle itself provided the required matter of marvel and mystery. 
 The Chronicle ascribed to Charlemagne's contemporary, Turpin, Arch- 
 bishop of Rheims — a work in reality of some monastic wTiter in 
 the twelfth century — furnished the veracious authority for those 
 daemonic and angelic agencies in the adventures of the Emperor and 
 his peers which so greatly delighted the humour of the Italian poets 
 of the Renaissance.*^ As late as the age of Caxton, the record of the 
 wonderful feats of Arthur and his knights was regarded as mainly 
 worthy of perusal, because the prose romances of the thirteenth and 
 fourteenth centuries were held by Society to be true history.^ 
 
 By insensible stages we thus arrive at the last class of *roman' 
 which ansAvers completely to the description of Warton and Dunlop, 
 namely, an ' arbitrary species of fiction \ consisting mainly of stories 
 about 'giants, dragons, and enchanted castles, which form the 
 seasoning of the adventures of chivalry \ These are the romances 
 which turned the brain of Don Quixote and excited the wrath of 
 
 ^ Dunlop, Histoi'y of Fiction, vol. i, p. 233. 
 
 2 Ibid., vol. i, p. 237. 
 
 ^ Ibid., vol. i, pp. 159-72 (1888. Addition by Mr. Henry A\llson, the Editor). 
 
 * Ibid. (1888), vol. i, pp. 274-5. 
 
 ^ Caxton's Preface to Malory's King Arthur. 
 
10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Cervantes. They were mostly produced, or at least found the most 
 appreciative readers, in the Spanish peninsula during the fifteenth 
 and sixteenth centuries, and all of them proceed on the method of 
 composition initiated by Amadw of Gaul, The element of fiction in 
 them entirely overpowers the element of history and the imitation of 
 contemporary manners. No profession is made that the events related 
 are recorded even in the legends of the country. The characters are 
 purely ideal. The knight-heroes, as a rule, are illegitimate, and have 
 been exposed at their birth. Their names — Felixmarte, Esplandian, 
 and the like — are plainly the invention of the authors ; the countries 
 through which they wander are often unrecognized by geography; 
 the enemies whom they encounter are giants, dragons, and magicians ; 
 and the ladies who fall in love with them are Eastern princesses, 
 fairies, and enchantresses. Tribal genealogies disappear from the 
 story; but, by way of compensation, the family descent of the 
 fictitious heroes is traced through an endless series of generations, so 
 that the family of Amadis or Palmerin never seems to fail in 
 producing a hero capable of fascinating the world with his impossible 
 perfections. In fact, the invention of the oral minstrel — the direct 
 product of tribal tradition — has given place to the art of the pro- 
 fessional novelist — the literary purveyor for the amusement of civil 
 society — and, while the characters presented to the reader show an 
 ideal consistency much in advance of the Romances of the Round 
 Table, only a boundless credulity can accept them as images of men 
 and women who have once moved on the earth's surface. Yet even 
 in these 'arbitrary fictions' the titles maintain a faint pretence of 
 history, which indicates the metrical 'roman' as the remote source 
 of their being. One famous Romance destroyed by the Barber and 
 Curate, Don Quixote's rationalizing friends, was called The Chronicle 
 of the famous Knight Listiarte of Greece^ son of Esplandian, and of 
 Perion, son of Amadis of Gaul. The alternative title of the Tenth 
 Book of Amadis of Gaul is The Chronicle of Don Florisel de Niquea, 
 son of Amadis of Greece, 
 
 To sum up what has been said — If the method of classification 
 I have employed be correct, it follows that Warton's view of the 
 origin of Romantic Fiction is wrong in three points — (1) in describing 
 Mediaeval Romance as an 'arbitrary species oi fiction'' •, (2) in supposing 
 this species of fiction to have been imported ready-made into Europe 
 by the Arabians ; (3) in assuming the form of the Romances to have 
 been free of all influence from Greek and Roman literature. In point 
 of fact. Mediaeval Romance was the result of a gradual process of 
 evolution, being an imitation, from age to age, of the contemporary 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROMANCE 11 
 
 manners of feudal society, veiled under the garb of supposed history. 
 It was, at the outset, the work partly of the Norman or French 
 minstrel, partly of the monkish chronicler, the latter of whom 
 furnished in Latin the historical matter which the former moulded 
 into such poetical form as the Romance language of the time 
 admitted. Very soon the poetical genius of the ' trouvere "* prevailed 
 over the chronicler's profession of historical truth, and the ' roman ' 
 assumed many of those features of the Greek fictions which excited the 
 admiration of the minstrel. The historical element continued to 
 decay, the fictitious to increase, until at last what was once generally 
 regarded as a species of veracious history came to be recognized as 
 a mere imaginative entertainment, and Ancient Romance in its original 
 sense expired. 
 
 Modern Romance proceeds in an ascending scale from a base exactly 
 opposite to the old ' Roman ' — in other words, whereas mediaeval 
 Romance presupposes certain real objects and events, the outlines of 
 which gradually dissolve into conscious fiction, modern Romance 
 employs conscious fiction to decorate or disguise the outlines of 
 real objects. It is inseparably connected with mediaeval Romance ; 
 but the stream of connexion, like a river which has disappeared 
 underground, can be identified only by comparing the essential 
 qualities of the new fiction, at the point of reappearance, with those 
 of the old ' roman \ Mediaeval Romance died from the effects of two 
 sets of causes, one social, the other technical. The social cause was 
 the disappearance of the Feudal system, partly through its own 
 internal decay, partly through its transformation by the reviving 
 influence of Roman civil and municipal law, which produced a new 
 life and order in society, but left no external object of imitation so 
 pleasing to the imagination as the old institutions of chivalry. The 
 technical cause was the replacement of the minstrel's song by the 
 written or printed book. Being in immediate touch with his 
 audience, the imaginative success of the oral minstrel depended 
 on the life-like imitation of external objects as familiar to the 
 body of his hearers as to himself; whereas the book, being the 
 product of, and appealing to, solitary meditation, reflects only 
 the individual perceptions of the author's mind. Hence ancient 
 Romance embodied in an ideal form the manners and sentiments of 
 mediaeval society at large, while modern Romance tends rather to 
 reflect the ideas of Nature and Man formed by a multiplicity of 
 differing imaginations. 
 
 The adjective * romantic' may be used in three different senses. 
 It may be applied either to that imaginative temper which is 
 
12 PROCEEDLNGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 readily credulous of the marvels and improbabilities of fiction ; or 
 to that class of fiction which deals with the mysterious and super- 
 natural as opposed to novels imitating actual life and manners ; or, 
 lastly, to a set of artistic principles which form the natural antithesis 
 to the principles usually described by the term ' classic \ In each 
 case the word ' romantic '' possesses some analogy to that ' arbitrary 
 species of fiction "* described by Warton and Dunlop as peculiar to 
 the tales of chivalry; but just as the character of the mediaeval 
 'romans' was constantly modified to suit the altering conditions of 
 feudal ages, so has modern Romance adapted itself to the changes of 
 spirit which transform the structure of civil society. 
 
 1. The best illustration of historic change in * romantic "* temper is 
 perhaps to be found in a comparison of Cervantes' account of the 
 character of Don Quixote with Walter Scott's representation of the 
 romanticism of the hero of Waverley. Don Quixote's ' fancy ', says 
 Cervantes, *grew full of what he used to read about in his books, 
 enchantments, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, 
 and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind 
 that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true that 
 to him no history in the world had more reality in it.'^ Edward 
 Waverley's character is also represented as being formed by his 
 imaginative reading; but in his case the rationalizing spirit of the 
 Renaissance has intervened ; civil institutions have been established ; 
 the belief in the supernatural has waned ; and Waverley's quixotic 
 conduct is explained by the miscellaneous confusion of his literary 
 studies, unchecked by knowledge of the actual world. ' My intention,' 
 says Scott, * is not to follow the steps of the inimitable Cervantes in 
 describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the 
 objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common 
 aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences 
 indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of 
 its own romantic tone and colouring.' 
 
 ' Waverley ' — so his character is described — * had read, and stored in 
 a memory of uncommon tenacity, much curious though ill-arranged 
 and miscellaneous information. In English literature he was master of 
 Shakespeare and Milton ; of our earlier dramatic authors ; of many 
 picturesque and interesting passages from our old historical chronicles; 
 and was particularly well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other 
 poets who have exercised themselves on romantic fiction, of all themes 
 the most fascinating to a youthful imagination before the passions have 
 roused themselves, and demand poetry of a more sentimental descrip- 
 tion. In this respect his acquaintance with Italian opened him yet 
 
 * Don Quixote (Ormsby's translation), Part \, chap. i. 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROMANCE 13 
 
 a wider range. He had perused the numerous poems which from the 
 days of Pulci have been a favourite exercise for the wits of Italy ; and 
 had sought gratification in the numerous collections of "novelle"", 
 which were brought forth by the genius of that elegant though luxu- 
 rious nation in emulation of the Decameron. In classical literature 
 Waverley had made the usual progress, and read the usual authors ; 
 and the French had afforded him an almost exhaustless collection of 
 memoirs scarcely more faithful than romances, and of romances so well 
 written as hardly to be distinguished from memoirs. The splendid 
 pages of Froissart, with his heart-stirring and eye-dazzling descrip- 
 tions of war and tournaments, were among his chief favourites ; and 
 from those of Brantome and De la None he learned to compare the 
 wild and loose yet superstitious character of the Nobles of the League 
 with the stern, rigid, and sometimes turbulent disposition of the 
 Huguenot party. The Spanish had contributed to his stock of 
 chivalrous and romantic lore. The earlier literature of the northern 
 nations did not escape the study of one who read rather to awaken 
 the imagination than to benefit the understanding. And yet, knowing 
 much that is known but to few, Edward Waverley might justly be 
 considered as ignorant, since he knew little of what adds dignity to 
 man and qualifies him to support and adorn an elevated position in 
 society.' ^ 
 
 2. As the internal change in the constitution of European society 
 transformed from age to age the romantic temper of the individual 
 imagination, so did it gradually modify the form of the fictions by 
 which that imagination was gratified. Though the institutions of 
 chivalry decayed in every nation, the memory of them was still 
 preserved at every Court ; but their fictitious image was deprived 
 of the incredible attributes with which it had been invested in the 
 stories of Amadis or Palmerin. In Sidney's Arcadia there is no 
 supernatural machinery: the void is filled with pastoral imagery. 
 Pastoralism too is adopted, a generation later, as a device for 
 decorating Court manners, in the Astree of D'Urfe; and for this 
 purpose the Daphnw and Chloe of Longus is frequently referred to 
 as a model. As time goes on the style of romantic fiction becomes 
 in France increasingly literary, and by the Scuderys Greek history is 
 ransacked to find parallels for the aristocratic heroes of the Fronde. 
 The French Heroic Romance is in fashion at the same time as the 
 English Heroic Play, and furnishes suggestions for the composition 
 of Parthenissa and Oroonoho to the Earl of Orrery and Mrs. Aphra 
 Behn. Then, as the flood of romanticism bursts the barriers of the 
 Court, and overflows middle-class society, the figures of knights and 
 shepherds are replaced in the English romances of the eighteenth 
 century by gentlemen of impeccable perfection, like Sir Charles 
 
 ^ Waverley, chap. iii. 
 
14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Grandison, or cottagers of stainless virtue, like Pamela Andrews. 
 These are the direct and lineal descendants of the Amadises and 
 Orianas of Chivalrous Romance ; but, at the same time, the influence 
 of the Renaissance is seen in the popularity of the 'picaresque' 
 novel, the remote offspring of the mediaeval 'fabliau'. Gil Bias, 
 Tom Jones, and Roderick Random, in their imitation of actual 
 manners and character, form the natural counterpoise to the roman- 
 ticism of Richardson. The diversified imagination of society, in fact, 
 demands both forms of fiction, and especially craves to be trans- 
 ported beyond the limits of its own experience; at length, after 
 many vain attempts by different authors to create an imaginative 
 illusion, Scott discovers how to enlarge the bounds of 'probability' 
 in fiction, by uniting the principle of the ' roman ' with that of the 
 'fabliau'. 
 
 3. Extended into a yet larger sphere of art, and exhibited in 
 a more complex form, the same conflict of imaginative principles 
 appears in the opposition of the two schools of criticism known as 
 ' Classic ' and ' Romantic '. Madame de Stael was, I think, the first 
 to popularize the use of these terms in her book De VAllema^ne, 
 descriptive of life and character in Germany. ' The word " classic ",' 
 she says, * is sometimes used as synonymous with perfection. I use it 
 here in a different sense, and regard classic poetry as that of the 
 ancients, and romantic poetry as that which in some way is connected 
 with the traditions of chivalry. This division relates equally to two 
 eras of the world ; that which preceded the establishment of Christianity, 
 and that which followed it.' ^ Madame de Stael's account of the two 
 schools consists substantially of a contrast between the French school 
 of poetry, as representing the classic principle, and the German, as 
 the type of the romantic. Her method of judgement is sound, for, 
 as she says, France, ' the most cultivated of the Latin nations, inclines 
 to the classic form, imitated from the Greeks and Romans,' ^ while 
 Germany has preserved in her institutions more of the mediaeval 
 spirit than any other nation in Europe. Madame de Stael 
 regards the opposite features of the classic and romantic styles 
 as springing mainly from contrasted qualities in the French and 
 German races; but I think the whole question may be treated at 
 once more universally and more precisely, if the classic form be 
 considered as mainly the product of the modern Revival of Letters, 
 and the romantic of mediaeval Feudalism. For both those two great 
 social movements operated, not only in France and Germany, but in 
 
 ^ De VAllemagne (Madame de Stael), chap. xi. * Ibid., chap. xi. 
 
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROMANCE 15 
 
 every country of Europe which came into any kind of relation with 
 the Empire of Charlemagne, or which was affected by its institutions 
 and their decline. 
 
 Romanticism is in effect a self-conscious temper in the European 
 imagination, produced by that ancient conflict between the prin- 
 ciples of Paganism and Christianity which has resulted in the decay 
 of the mediaeval and the establishment of the modem civil order. 
 From the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, 
 in the two countries where the conflict prevailed with the greatest 
 acuteness, France and Germany, a kind of inward and spiritual 
 warfare distracted men's minds, from the perception in France that 
 Absolutism was crushing all freedom of individual thought, and in 
 Germany that the multiplicity of free individual thought was 
 destroying all capacity for national action. The French genius ex- 
 pressed its agony in works like Rousseau's Confesswiis and Nouvelle 
 Heloise ; the German, sometimes in plays like The Robbers of Schiller 
 or the Goetz von Berlkhingen of Goethe, sometimes in novels like Tlie 
 Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe, in his Wahrheit und Dkhtung, 
 expresses vividly the distracted feeling produced in the imaginative 
 German mind by the sense of its incapacity to create objectively, so 
 long as society, torn asunder by the strife between these two extreme 
 principles, wanted an outlet of political action. ' I learned,"* he says, 
 ' to value more and more the importance of subject-matter and con- 
 ciseness of treatment ; vvithout, however, being able to make it clear 
 to myself where the former was to be looked for or the latter attained. 
 For what with the great narro\vness of my situation, what with the 
 indifference of my companions, the reserve of the professors, the 
 exclusiveness of cultivated society, and the perfect insignificance of 
 all natural objects, I was compelled to seek for everything within 
 myself.' ^ Under such a regime, while many Germans tried to escape 
 from the dilemma by surrendering their liberties to the Absolutist 
 order, as established by the French both in politics and art, many 
 others rushed into the opposite extreme, and, in pursuit of individual 
 liberty, revolted from the restraint of every kind of rule. Protesting 
 against the existing civil order of things, and reviving in their 
 imaginations the idea of a past Golden Feudal Age, they found them- 
 selves in a situation somewhat resembling that of Don Quixote, and, 
 as the motives of Love, Liberty, and Adventure, which they advocated, 
 were the leading features in the latest development of mediaeval 
 * romans', they naturally assumed the name of 'Romantics' in opposition 
 
 1 Goethe^, Wahrheit und JDichtung, Book VIL 
 
16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 to antagonists representing the 'pig-tail' school (as they called it) 
 which upheld the principles of French classicalism. 
 
 It is far from my intention to enter into the merits of the quarrel 
 between these rival schools. The purpose of my lecture has rather 
 been to show that, from first to last, there has been a continuous 
 stream of thought flowing through the imaginative literature of 
 Christian Europe. The progress of ancient romance was from the 
 chronicling of supposed reality to the invention of extravagant 
 fiction; the tendency of modern fiction is to invest the romantic 
 conceptions of the individual mind with an air of reality. I desire to 
 support Mr. Ker's appeal to the student that all literary antagonisms 
 may be examined historically. Beside the linguistic studies recom- 
 mended by Mr. Ker, it appears to me that nothing is to-day more 
 desirable than a scientific investigation (as far as that is possible) of 
 the spirit animating the great authors of poetry and fiction who have 
 left a permanent inheritance to their countrymen and to the human 
 race. If the early Humanists and their followers were too narrow 
 and exclusive in the spirit of their criticism, we have to guard against 
 an equally dangerous tendency in our own times of considering by- 
 gone ages from a merely archaeological point of view. The noblest 
 kind of Humanism, in my opinion, is that which is animated by the 
 spirit of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who regarded what they 
 considered best in the past 'as contributing to the meaning and 
 value of the day\^ We cannot sever our life from the life of our 
 ancestors, and the more clearly we understand the temper in which 
 they viewed the intellectual and social difficulties that are the lot 
 of humanity, the more practical will be the remedies we ourselves may 
 be able to offer for the spiritual diseases from which we suffer. 
 
 ^ Mr. Ker in his Inaugural Lecture. 
 
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